Data Scientist - Vitality (Senior)

#TeamNextdoor

Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.

Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 305,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Meet Your Future Neighbors

As a Data Scientist at Nextdoor, you will be responsible for design and oversight of product experiments, own complex analysis to drive company and product strategy, and deploy online and offline models to a production environment. We use a semi-embedded team structure, in which a group of data team members works on a specific product or pillar, interfacing directly with product and engineering stakeholders. The Data Science group is made up of people from a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives, trained in fields as wide-ranging as psychology, geology, physics, and statistics. We are the mathematical decision scientists for their product development organization and play an active and collaborative role in building and improving the product.

The Impact You’ll Make

As a Data Scientist on the Vitality team, you will focus on our content moderation system by using data-driven insights in close collaboration with our ML engineering team and Infrastructure teams, developing models to understand user engagement, causal effects, and content ecosystem. You will define and own the ways we measure success for the team.

You will be part of the broader Vitality Pillar at Nextdoor that works to ensure our neighbors are safe and promote kind engagement on the platform . We are looking for an entrepreneurial and driven data scientist to accelerate our efforts and be a major part of our data-centric culture. This person will work closely with various cross-functional teams such as product, engineering, design to develop and deliver metrics, analyses, solutions, and insights. 

Successful candidates will exhibit technical acumen, product sense and business savvy, with a passion for making an impact through timely execution. You are keen on building a deeper understanding into ML algorithms and ranking/recommendation systems.

Your responsibilities will include:  

• Design and develop algorithms and models to optimize our content moderation ecosystem
• Experiment design: Make sure we run experiments efficiently and accurately, including monitoring early feature development through tracking post-release follow-ups
• Develop and share key strategic insights through data analysis, evaluating the performance and impact of the product team
• Build scalable metrics and dashboards to inform product strategy
• Partner with cross-functional teams to support product development efforts (including product, design, engineering, marketing, and operations)
• Care deeply about data quality and empowering employees to leverage data to help them succeed in their careers and help Nextdoor grow

Requirements

• 4+ years of relevant work experience. MS or PhD in a quantitative discipline: statistics, operations research, computer science, informatics, engineering, applied mathematics, economics, etc.
• Experience in applied statistics and statistical modeling in at least one statistical software package, preferably R/Python
• Experience in designing trustworthy experimentation and analyzing complex product a/b testing results
• Deep understanding of ML models and preferably experience in production model deployment
• Expert knowledge of SQL, Python programming, including common scientific computing packages and data science tools such as numpy, pandas, and scikit-learn
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to synthesize, simplify and explain complex problems to different types of audience, including executives and compile compelling narratives
• Ability to solve ambiguous business problems with structured analytics framework
• Innate curiosity around finding meaningful insights that inform the way we think about and develop both our product and our business strategies

Bonus Points

• Experience working in Trust & Safety and/or content moderation space

Rewards

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create one overall rewards package.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $145,000 to $237,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. Compensation may also vary by geography.

We also expect to award